Wednesday, 29 February 2012

"Most of our
theories of laughter are not concerned with laughter. Rather, their
focus is the laughable object, whether conceived of as the comic, the
humorous, jokes, the grotesque, the ridiculous, or the ludicrous. In
Laughter, Anca Parvulescu proposes a return to the materiality of the
burst of laughter itself. She sets out to uncover an archive of
laughter, inviting us to follow its rhythms and listen to its
tones.Historically, laughter--especially the passionate burst of
laughter--has often been a faux pas. Manuals for conduct, abetted by
philosophical treatises and literary and visual texts, warned against
it, offering special injunctions to ladies to avoid jollity that was too
boisterous. Returning laughter to the history of the passions,
Parvulescu anchors it at the point where the history of the grimacing
face meets the history of noise. In the civilizing process that leads to
laughter's "falling into disrepute," as Nietzsche famously put it, we
can see the formless, contorted face in laughter being slowly corrected
into a calm, social smile.How did the twentieth century laugh?Parvulescu
points to a gallery of twentieth-century laughers and friends of
laughter, arguing that it is through Georges Bataille that the century
laughed its most distinct laugh. In Bataille's wake, laughter becomes
the passion at the heart of poststructuralism. Looking back at the
century from this vantage point, Parvulescu revisits four of its most
challenging projects: modernism, the philosophical avant-gardes,
feminism, and cinema. The result is an overview of the twentieth century
as seen through the laughs that burst at some of its most convoluted
junctures."

Tuesday, 28 February 2012

Description of a Cripple, from Elizabeth Gaskell's short story 'The well of Pen-Morfa' (1852)

Nest revived during the warm summer weather. Edward came to see her,
and stayed the allotted quarter of an hour; but he dared not look her in
the face. She was, indeed, a cripple: one leg was much shorter than the
other, and she halted on a crutch. Her face, formerly so brilliant in
colour, was wan and pale with suffering; the bright roses were gone,
never to return. Her large eyes were sunk deep down in their hollow,
cavernous sockets; but the light was in them still, when Edward came.
Her mother dreaded her returning strength - dreaded, yet desired it; for
the heavy burden of her secret was most oppressive at times, and she
thought

Edward was beginning to weary of his enforced attentions. One
October evening she told her the truth. She even compelled her
rebellious heart to take the cold, reasoning side of the question; and
she told her child that her disabled frame was a disqualification for
ever becoming a farmer's wife. She spoke hardly, because her inner agony
and sympathy was such, she dared not trust herself to express the
feelings that were rending her. But Nest turned away from cold reason;
she revolted from her mother; she revolted from the world. She bound her
sorrow tight up in her breast, to corrode and fester there.

Night after night, her mother heard her cries and moans--more
pitiful, by far, than those wrung from her by bodily pain a year before;
and night after night, if her mother spoke to soothe, she proudly
denied the existence of any pain but what was physical, and consequent
upon her accident.

I do not forget the popular opinion, that the Grecian statues were
not modelled after nature. I mean, not according to the
proportions of a particular man; but that beautiful limbs and
features were selected from various bodies to form an harmonious
whole. This might, in some degree, be true. The fine ideal
picture of an exalted imagination might be superior to the
materials which the painter found in nature, and thus it might with
propriety be termed rather the model of mankind than of a man. It
was not, however, the mechanical selection of limbs and features,
but the ebullition of an heated fancy that burst forth; and the
fine senses and enlarged understanding of the artist selected the
solid matter, which he drew into this glowing focus.

I observed that it was not mechanical, because a whole was
produced—a model of that grand simplicity, of those concurring
energies, which arrest our attention and command our reverence.
For only insipid lifeless beauty is produced by a servile copy of
even beautiful nature. Yet, independent of these observations, I
believe, that the human form must have been far more beautiful than
it is at present, because extreme indolence, barbarous ligatures,
and many causes, which forcibly act on it, in our luxurious state
of society, did not retard its expansion, or render it deformed.

---

Besides, nothing can be so prejudicial to the morals of the
inhabitants of country towns, as the occasional residence of a set
of idle superficial young men, whose only occupation is gallantry,
and whose polished manners render vice more dangerous, by
concealing its deformity under gay ornamental drapery. An air of
fashion, which is but a badge of slavery, and proves that the soul
has not a strong individual character, awes simple country people
into an imitation of the vices, when they cannot catch the slippery
graces of politeness.

---

Going back to first principles, vice skulks, with all its native
deformity, from close investigation; but a set of shallow reasoners
are always exclaiming that these arguments prove too much, and that
a measure rotten at the core may be expedient. Thus expediency is
continually contrasted with simple principles, till truth is lost
in a mist of words, virtue in forms, and knowledge rendered a
sounding nothing, by the specious prejudices that assume its name.

---

A man of rank or
fortune, sure of rising by interest, has nothing to do but to
pursue some extravagant freak; whilst the needy GENTLEMAN, who is
to rise, as the phrase turns, by his merit, becomes a servile
parasite or vile pander.

---

Thus,
as wars, agriculture, commerce, and literature, expands the mind,
despots are compelled, to make covert corruption hold fast the
power which was formerly snatched by open force.* And this baneful
lurking gangrene is most quickly spread by luxury and superstition,
the sure dregs of ambition. The indolent puppet of a court first
becomes a luxurious monster, or fastidious sensualist, and then
makes the contagion which his unnatural state spreads, the
instrument of tyranny.

It is the pestiferous purple which renders the progress of
civilization a curse, and warps the understanding, till men of
sensibility doubt whether the expansion of intellect produces a
greater portion of happiness or misery.
* Men of abilities scatter seeds that grow up, and have
a great influence on the forming opinion; and when once the public
opinion preponderates, through the exertion of reason, the
overthrow of arbitrary power is not very distant.

---

As to the argument respecting the subjection in which the sex has
ever been held, it retorts on man. The many have always been
enthralled by the few; and, monsters who have scarcely shown any
discernment of human excellence, have tyrannized over thousands of
their fellow creatures. Why have men of superior endowments
submitted to such degradation? For, is it not universally
acknowledged that kings, viewed collectively, have ever been
inferior, in abilities and virtue, to the same number of men taken
from the common mass of mankind—yet, have they not, and are they
not still treated with a degree of reverence, that is an insult to
reason?

Friday, 10 February 2012

Interesting to find Alan Moore writing for the BBC on the influence of his graphic novel (and film) V for Vendetta and the deployment by the hacking protest group Anonymous of the Guy Fawkes style mask. Catholic Guido Fawkes was, of course, one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators whose aim was to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. His failure is still celebrated every year on 5 November as Guy Fawkes Night, and more recently 'Bonfire Night'.

Children can be seen in some parts of the country with a comic-grotesque stuffed effigy of Guy, for whom, from adults, they demand 'a penny for the guy'. The sad creature is often led through the streets on a wheelbarrow or in a mock procession prior to being immolated on the celebratory fires.

Terror and uprising is one mode of resistance, but humour and laughter, as Bakhtin has demonstrated can be subversive too, and perhaps more effective in the long run, with less blood, and fewer dead bodies. Clowning-style protests as an antidote to monolithic brutality and totalitarianism have been in fashion for some time now. Monstrous, unstable, comic metamorphosis is being used as a subversive unpicking of immobile unresponsive authority.

Linking the mask with the protest Alan Moore has stated that "It also seems that our character's charismatic grin has provided a
ready-made identity for these highly motivated protesters, one embodying
resonances of anarchy, romance, and theatre that are clearly
well-suited to contemporary activism, from Madrid's Indignados to the
Occupy Wall Street movement."

Alan Moore explains the Revolutionary link in which the transgressor is adopted in a more redeeming guise as a potential liberator from tyranny: "At the start of the 1980s when the ideas that would coalesce into V for Vendetta were springing up from a summer of anti-Thatcher riots across the UK coupled with a worrying surge from the far-right National Front, Guy Fawkes' status as a potential revolutionary hero seemed to be oddly confirmed by circumstances surrounding the comic strip's creation: it was the strip's artist, David Lloyd, who had initially suggested using the Guy Fawkes mask as an emblem for our one-man-against-a-fascist-state lead character."

If you take a look at the images of processions, gatherings of crowds, and ritual burnings there is a messianic (end of the world) feel to them that sits uncomfortably with the fireworks, toffee apples and celebration. history is open to multiple interpretation, and reliving it can be a perilous activity of radical and revolutionary transmission. Raising spectres is a dangerous business.

Alan Moore concludes:

"Then, a depraved neglect of the poor and the "squeezed middle" led inexorably to an unanticipated reaction in the horrific form of Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War which, as it happens, was bloodily concluded in Northamptonshire.

Today's response to similar oppressions seems to be one that is intelligent, constantly evolving and considerably more humane, and yet our character's borrowed Catholic revolutionary visage and his incongruously Puritan apparel are perhaps a reminder that unjust institutions may always be haunted by volatile 17th century spectres, even if today's uprisings are fuelled more by social networks than by gunpowder.